In nearly five months of driving highways and byways across the country, "Going Out of Business" signs have seemed a standard element of the modern American landscape. I barely notice them anymore, even those hued in sense-shocking shades of florescent with four-foot letters screaming "EVERYTHING MUST GO!". At the 243 T-junction entering Osceola, Wisconsin, I make an uncharacteristically complete stop as my mind demands processing time for the unusual sight of a "Grand Opening" banner.

The driver behind me breaks the moment with a perturbed bleat of car horn. Still unsure I'd read the sign correctly, I circle through a gas station parking lot and return to the intersection for a better look. Peering through the darkness, I look for the numbers 2009 on the "Oktoberfest & Grand Opening" advertisement of a local bar and restaurant called Tippy Canoes. My planned route turned south at Osceola, but plans change when there's a party to attend, so I head north to go find out how the owners have managed to launch such an endeavor under the current economic circumstances.

Pulling into the packed parking lot of Tippy Canoes, I can hear Duran Duran's "Hungry Like the Wolf" blasting from a canopy set up outside the restaurant. One minute wandering through the tent endows me with deep admiration for the local stock's endurance in bone-chilling cold, though the flowing kegs of beer and buckets of fire must help somewhat. Co-owner Allison Bahr is pouring drinks at the crowded bar inside, but I track down her affable Aussie husband of 13 years and new business partner, Rodney, who takes a break from chatting up guests to tell me their story.

Rodney opened a pizza place at age 16 in his small hometown down under, and Allison hails from a family of bar and grille owners. Together they've nurtured a dream to open their own place, as Rodney explains: "Allison and I have a long business background, we just thought that our energy, ambitions and positive effort would be best spent working self employed, rather than for some alternate entity."

The Bahrs began actively looking for a location to make their own two years ago before the recession had begun to really cripple commerce. They couldn't put their dream on hold simply because the larger economic landscape looked dismal, particularly not this summer after they assessed possibilities for the building now called Tippy Canoes, which had been empty for six months after the previous restaurant went out of business--a casualty of mismanagement more than anything else, according to Rodney. "We got what we felt was a great price, followed by great terms with minimal monies down, a building with huge growth potential in a sizeable and reputable town that needed a restaurant, followed by its location on a main highway of 12,000 cars per day and the fact that it was just one hour from the Twin Cities and located next to a hotel. We felt it was finally the right fit to put our blood, sweat and tears into."

The real estate investor who owns the site wanted to fully unload the property, but the current state of commercial credit blocked standard routes to financing the purchase, so the property owner offered to negotiate terms for a land contract. "He said it was a land contract, or nothing," Rodney recalls.

Land contracts are real estate transactions involving seller-based financing. The interest rates and payment schedule can be similar to a conventional loan, but the transaction doesn't require direct involvement of or approval from a financial institution. The seller holds onto the title for the contract's negotiated duration, but the buyer takes possession of the property, keeping to an agreed upon payment schedule until their debt is satisfied and they assume full legal ownership.

Also called a contract for deed or installment sales agreement, land contracts aren't unheard of, though they certainly aren't common practice. Legal requirements vary by state, and many such arrangements are not even officially recorded, which has made it difficult to determine whether or not seller-based financing is happening more frequently these days. Considering the tightening of the credit markets, however, I don't think it illogical to surmise that individuals and small businesses may be pursuing less conventional routes for financing.

Under the terms of their land contract, Rodney and Allison have an 18/18 three-year schedule until a balloon payment would be due to conclude the deal. This means they will again seek commercial financing after 18 months, but if it's unavailable, their arrangement with the seller continues. "My instinct is that things won't have recovered enough in 18 months," Rodney says. If after three years they still can't secure outside financing, they would be at a great disadvantage trying to negotiate terms of an extension with the deed holder. "We're in a hard economy, so we had to take that risk."

The Bahrs would be ecstatic about the way things have gone in the few weeks they've been open for business, if they weren't feeling squeezed by their electricity and gas providers, as Rodney explains: "So a total of $9200 is requested as security [deposits] for the large corporations, what about the little guy trying to aid in reviving the economy, now creating employment for 20+ people, do we get any security for our risk? I understand somewhat this rational, but only if we had already had late payments... Once again corporate America's stronghold will rule superior and will potentially be the demise, of any revitalizing of our economy. They are now also charging late payment fees on the balance of the unpaid security deposit. Must be nice to have the power, literally. So next time their service fails, do I get the right to charge for their shortfalls, loss of business? Dream on Mr. Small Proprietor!"

Despite the serious risks his family faces embarking on small business ownership during an era of economic turmoil, Rodney relishes the challenge and expresses a certain appreciation for the intangible benefits such hard times may effect in his adopted country. "We are all fortunate to live essentially in the Disneyland of the world and no matter how long this recession takes to level out, we have no right to complain about the predicament we are in," he says. "Hopefully we as individuals will get back to enjoying the true basics and essence of life, instead of being part of a rat race to keep up with the Joneses."

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.